Sender: •••@••.••• On Mar 31, 18:37, Cyber Rights wrote: > NorthStar has an article about a secret "dirty word list" that AOL > uses to censor postings. According to the author, people's postings > get deleted for unknown reasons and no one can make AOL say what its > policy is. Email me if you would like the article. This is true. However, there's a Web site which allegedly claims to have a copy of this list, and has posted it for public consumption: http://www.cloud9.net/~jegelhof/ There are a whole slew of nasty rumors surrounding what AOL's done to users in the past. Back in January, a whole bunch of poets got TOSed or kicked off the service for using objectionable language -- and some postings were removed without even a notice to the author. One of these poems used the word "breast" (this was shortly before various breast cancer survivors embarrased the hell out of AOL for banning that word). Details are available at: http://www.motley-focus.com/~timber/aol.html Further rumors and innuendo can be found in the alt.aol-sucks FAQ, on alt.answers. And finally (for those who care), I've steg'd ZIPped copies of both the Obscenity Guidelines, and one of the banned poems in two graphics I produced for "24 Hours in Democracy". Steganography is basically hiding data in other things -- in this case, JPEGs. Head over to the Cypherpunks archive (http://www.suunyside.com/cypherpunks/), and pick up the JPEG v4 source and the jpeg-jsteg diff patch if you're really bored and curious. The graphics are at: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~hwh6k/public/hope.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~hwh6k/public/artists-know.html The data is steg'd in the smaller versions of each graphic. -H P.S. A cursory search of the AOL server turns up NOTHING on either the Obscenity Guidelines, or their Terms of Service. Somehow, I'm not surprised. ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~ Posted by Andrew Oram - •••@••.••• - Moderator: CYBER-RIGHTS (CPSR) Cyber-Rights: http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/cyber-rights/ ftp://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/cyber-rights/Library/ CyberJournal: (WWW or FTP) --> ftp://ftp.iol.ie/users/rkmoore Materials may be reposted in their _entirety_ for non-commercial use. ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
